Since the release of Rockbox 2.4 on December 23rd 2004, a lot has happened in the Rockbox project. Despite the plans to start releasing every two months, a good while longer has passed since. This has been caused partly by a lot of work going into the iriver port (more about this later) and partly by the fact that noone got around to preparing the release. Now it is time to release Rockbox 2.5 to you, as there are many new features and changes that we feel you should all benefit from.

What's new?

Among the more notable changes, is the fact that the dreaded Red LED Death, a long-standing bug that showed itself by the red harddisk LED being stuck on, has almost been fixed. It now occurs very rarely, and these crashes may in fact be caused by different bugs. Futhermore, an ID3 database browser has been added to Rockbox, making it possible to browse your files organised by artist, album or title - regardless of how your files are arranged in the filesystem. A searchengine for this behaviour has also been created, allowing you to create playlists from a wide range of criteria, such as "Artist contains john and year > 1995".

On the recording side of things, volume triggered recording has been added. Rockbox can automatically detect sound, start a recording and then stop the recording on silence. This feature is quite advanced, and allows for a lot of different variations of recording based on sound level.

The behaviour of the red LED has changed. When rockbox is in recording mode the red LED indicates that a recording is in progress. During playback it shows hd activity just as before.

Because of the added features, it is no longer possible to keep RomBox and the original Archos firmware in flash. To still have a backup firmware, a new minimal firmware called Bootbox has been created to put in place of the Archos firmware. Bootbox is a lot smaller, and this means that there's now plenty of room for Rockbox in the flash. It also means that we can in the future distribute full flash images with no Archos firmware. The rockbox wiki pages include information about using Bootbox. The risk of corrupted recordings has also been lowered considerably.

How to upgrade

Note: If you've been using a build other than Rockbox 2.4, some of these things may be slightly different.

Before you upgrade, you should save your current settings to a file, as they will be reset to the default settings when installing Rockbox 2.5. This is done through the menu "General Settings > Manage Settings > Write .cfg file".

Download Rockbox 2.5 from http://www.rockbox.org/download/. Using the Windows installer is the easiest way to install Rockbox 2.5. Simply run the installer and follow the on-screen instructions. The other alternative is to download the ZIP file for your jukebox and unzip it to the root (top) directory of your jukebox disk. Make sure you stop/eject/unmount the usb disk before you unplug it. All files in the zip file must be extracted, don't just install a few of them.

If you need more help, or want to use Bootbox to be able to install Rockbox to flash memory, see the Documentation section of this document for information on where to find help for doing this.

Now load the settings you saved before upgrading. This is done through the menu (note the new location) "Manage Settings > Browse .cfg files".

Works in progress

Since the last release work has progressed on ports to Gmini 120, the iriver H120/H140, H320/H340 and recently the iAUDIO X5, to be able to run Rockbox on newer players as the Archos models are slowly disappearing from the market. None of these are currently ready for release, but we'll give a short status summary from each port.

Gmini port

There was work started on a Rockbox port to some Archos Gmini models, that was looking really fine. The work has since then stalled completely since the main Gmini developer stopped his work due to a computer break-down. Find more info about this port on http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/GminiPort.

Iriver ports

The iriver H120/H140 port is far better manned, and is capable of playing multiple file formats. Though still not full-featured (missing features include recording and remote display support), a lot of people are using Rockbox exclusively on their irivers already. A port to the iriver H320/H340 is planned and will probably happen a lot faster than the current port since it shares a lot of its hardware with the H120/H140 series. Almost all of the remaining hardware has been identified now, and the main obstacle for a H320/H340 port to begin now is that no bootloader has been written. After this is done, drivers for the new (compared to H120/H140) hardware needs to be written, and the port should be ready to fly. Linus Nielsen Feltzing has recently started creating schematics of the H320/H340 and connected the BDM wiggler and further investigated the hardware to be able to write the bootloader needed for further progress. A good starting point for more information is http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IriverPort.

iAUDIO port

A port to the iAUDIO X5 has been started. Currently it is pretty much a one-man job. Christian Gmeiner is working on documenting the hardware and blindly writing drivers for some of it without being able to run code on it yet. The hardware is similar to the iriver H320/H340 in a lot of aspects so these two ports should be able to benefit from eachother. Read more about this port on http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IaudioPort.

Known bugs

As much as we try to avoid it, some bugs have simply not been worked out yet, and are still present in Rockbox 2.5. This is (unfortunately) not a complete list, but covers the best known, unresolved bugs.

The ID3 database browser's context menu doesn't work as you'd expect on folders, only on individual songs.

It seems as if songs are sometimes repeated in a playlist.

The playback code doesn't handle the situation where the buffer isn't filled after loading 16 very small files.

Recordings may still be corrupted, but is much less likely to occur with 2.5 than it was with 2.4.

The split editor doesn't handle disk errors very well and can't be interrupted.

It seems as if the Ondio has problems with the soft shutdown

The Sleep and wakeup timers can't be used at the same time

The F1+UP combination doesn't work on the Recorder, so we should find a better combination for key locking